Echoes of the Well of Souls watw-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  “They have an almost unnatural ability to figure out just which fruit is ready to be picked,” one of the Ambrezan supervisors commented to him.

  “But they don’t fill baskets or containers,” Brazil noted. “They just pile it all neatly.”

  “They won’t touch them. No Glathrielian will touch anything manufactured, even a box. They even make several trips carrying their ‘pay,’ which is a small percentage of the crop, back to their home in Glathriel in their arms.”

  “What about that home? Don’t they have some sort of village or whatever with shelter?”

  “No, they don’t. Not as we understand it, anyway. They do have tribal lands that they consider their home, but the few structures are very crude and very basic and formed entirely from gathered dead wood and dropped leaves. They don’t build as such. The few crude structures tend to be shelters for the babies and for bad weather. Mostly they sleep either out in the open or in hollow trees, some caves, and shelters formed from fallen logs and the like. They don’t even build or keep fires, although if a thunderstorm comes along and sets something off, they might use it until it goes out. They don’t kill unless something is trying to kill them and there is no other choice—and whatever that unfortunate animal is, they then eat it raw that same day.”

  “They seem to eat okay from what I can see,” Brazil noted. “The women seem to range from chubby to fat, and the men are built like bricks.”

  “They eat a complex variety of things, some of which we, and perhaps you, would find disgusting, but it seems the perfect balance for them. They make great workers, though. No complaints, virtually no mistakes, and they won’t touch, let alone eat, anything they haven’t picked themselves. They’re always good-humored in a childlike sort of way, and they’re so placid, they don’t even swat flies that land on them.”

  “How’d you ever get them to work for you?”

  “It’s been this way since long before my time or my grandfather’s time, too,” the Ambrezan supervisor replied. “Only a few tribes will do it, but they’ve been doing it forever on the border plantations and, I think, along the Zinjin Coast strip. The vast majority live way in the interior, which is mostly swamp and jungle with some volcanic areas. We used to try and survey them once upon a time, I’m told, but they can vanish like magic, and it just wasn’t worth the time and trouble. The fact is, we know very little about them beyond these border tribes.”

  “I know about that,” Brazil told him. “They asked me to do a report on them if I went in, figuring that since I’m related in a way to them, I might be taken as one of them if I went in.”

  “Well, that figures. You gonna go?”

  “Looks like it. I’m after another like myself. A female. Very small and very thin—even smaller and thinner than me. You haven’t seen or heard much about somebody like that, have you?”

  “Heard they was looking for somebody like that down the road apiece, but haven’t seen or heard a thing myself, no. Of course, I can’t tell any of you apart much, frankly, but I think I’d have noticed a female smaller and thinner than you, that’s for sure.” He sighed. “Well, if you’re gonna find her, you got maybe two weeks.”

  “Huh? Why’s that?”

  “Oh, they haven’t got any families as such. You can see the same kid with a different parent most any day. It’s all communal. That’s ‘cause, I think, they have one short period of a couple of days when all the women get fertile all at once and all the men can think of nothing else and they go at it, breaking only for sleep, for up to four days. Then they don’t do it anymore until the next month. Lots of animals like that, but I know of only a few races here that still have that old mechanism. They say we did back in prehistoric times or whatever, but not since.”

  The idea shook him. Just what did I do to you, people?

  It was coming back to him now in bits and pieces. When he’d come through that time off the spaceship, he’d discovered that the Ambreza had literally reduced the Glathrielians to animallike status. When he’d done his work in the Well, he’d fixed that so there’d be a slow but steady generational rise back to normality through providing immunity to the Ambreza gas—but in a nontech hex, which, he’d guessed, wouldn’t threaten the Ambreza.

  He’d been wrong. The next time through, he’d caught wind that the Glathrielians had gotten to a point where they knew the legends and stories about how they’d been kicked out of their ancestral home and brought low and were getting very curious about Ambrezan technology and doing a lot of work on natural chemicals themselves. The Ambreza leadership had been getting nervous even then; the seeds of potential genocide were being sown even then as the Ambreza’s imaginations started coming up with potential attacks far worse than the Glathrielians could have managed on their own.

  So while he and Mavra had reset and checked out the system, he’d made other changes to ensure that this would all die down. He’d removed the translation abilities from the Glathrielians so that they could only communicate among themselves, and he’d put a blocker in there so that no other language but theirs could get through. If they couldn’t reconnoiter and spy on their hated enemy, they wouldn’t be much of a threat. And he’d made what he thought then were some minor physiological changes to ensure that they adapted nearly perfectly to their present hex and would not be as comfortable in the one that was now Ambreza or lust for it so much.

  But this —these people, this totally primitive way—was not what he’d had in mind at all. He’d sought only to protect them from slaughter, not to reduce them to pre-Stone Age levels. What had the computer imposed logically on them that flowed from his premises? Just how badly had he goofed?

  What have I done?he wondered again, watching them. This was all he needed, he thought sourly. A hyperdose of pure guilt right now. I’m not going to keep ying-yanging these people around forever for some sin of ancestors even I can’t remember, he vowed. If I made a mistake, this time I’ll correct it, but, beyond that, from this point on, as much as I like the Ambreza, I’m not going to keep these people down again. If any new adjustments need to be done, by damn, I’ll do ‘em on the Ambreza for a change!

  He stared at them as they worked, trying to figure them out, and over a period of time he got a sense that he wasn’t seeing the whole picture, but he couldn’t put his finger on what was disturbing him that he hadn’t already quantified.

  And then he had it.

  There were no lame, no crippled, not so much as a limper among them. Well, they might leave all of those home. But no, it was more than that. In the kind of rough environment and natural way they lived, their creamy brown skins should have the signs of all sorts of incidental injuries, scars, and whatnot. There were none. Every one of their hides looked as smooth and untouched as a baby’s bottom. Not a scar or a scab among them, and some of them weren’t young.

  And that was impossible. It was something that just might not occur to the Ambreza, thankfully, but it was damned impossible. Something that they hid from everyone except themselves was definitely not kosher about the Glathrielians. Now he had to go in. Mavra was still the object, but he very much wanted to know just what the hell was going on there.

  His strange appearance, so like them and yet so different both in features and in the fact that he was clothed and having a conversation with Ambrezans, naturally drew curious looks from the Glathrielians. No, it was worse than that. They looked puzzled as all hell.

  Finally, one young woman came over to him a bit shyly but with definite purpose, a big smile of friendliness on her face. He smiled back at her, and she put out her hands, and after a moment of trying to figure out what she wanted, he put out his and they clasped hands.

  Suddenly he felt a strange, slightly dizzy sensation, and at the same time she gasped, let go forcefully, and backed away from him, a look of near terror in her eyes. As he followed her with his gaze, she broke and ran not toward the other tribespeople but away, at top speed, in the direction of the border.

  Now
what the hell?was all he could manage.

  The others were now also staring at him rather warily but just keeping their distance and working the grove. He decided to press on down the road and pick up the trail.

  The old Ambrezan couple who owned the plantation square in the middle of section B-14 hadn’t seen or heard much of anything, and they’d been very surprised when they’d gotten the call from the government, but they’d let the dogs out and had them sniff around, and sure enough, they had picked up some odd kind of trail in a grove of trees and followed it all the way to the border. It was quite puzzling to them; there were so many Glathrielian scents around that it would have to be something outside the dogs’ normal experience to have them take off like that.

  Nathan Brazil nodded but did not explain. If it were Mavra, and it certainly looked like there was no other possibility, she would smell of many alien things but little or nothing of the Well World.

  “You ain’t gonna track her with no dogs in there, no, sir,” the old Ambrezan told him. “They get in Glathriel a ways, and they go nuts. Can’t pick up anything—take you around in circles, they will. Horses and mules might work in some parts, but if you’re goin’ inhere, you’re goin’ right into the Great Swamp. Runs for half the hex, it does. Lots of water, killer snakes, vicious swamp lizards, and a lot worse.”

  He shrugged. “The Glathrielians seem to do all right in there.”

  “Well, maybe. Maybe it’s just ‘cause they have enough young to keep pace, too. Ever think of that? You don’t see no old ones, that’s for sure, and as peaceful as they are, they might just figure the thing’s got a right to eat ‘em. Or maybe they smell as bad to the animals there as they do to us—no offense, son. But you take a riding or pack animal in there, all you’ll do is give them vicious brutes a real feast and waste a good animal.”

  “I’ll walk,” he told them. “Been a while since I carried a full pack, but it won’t be the first time. She walked in there with nothing at all, and it’s only been two days or so. I might be able to pick up something. I was a pretty fair tracker once.”

  “Well, if she ain’t got eaten, you might have a chance,” the old gent admitted. “But I still wouldn’t like to go in there far. That place like that other world they say you come from? Might make a difference.”

  “No, not much. Parts of it are like that, but not the parts I like. Actually, my home’s more like, well, here .”

  And it was, too, he realized with a start. Maybe that was why he liked Ambreza and the Ambrezans so much. Given the same hex and a jump start, they’d either managed to develop a very Terranlike society and culture or, more likely, had co-opted parts of it, copied from those they had overthrown. Designed and bred for the hex they now found loathsome, the ones who’d been forced to take their place had come up very differently indeed, while the Ambrezan culture was, after all these thousands of years, virtually unchanged. Static. And they liked it that way.

  The Ambreza of their original hex had been creative, aggressive, clever enough to meet a threat when they were woefully mismatched. Moving here, they’d done almost certainly a far better job of managing the hex, but they’d grown soft, stagnant, and complacent, devoid of the daring and creativity that their remote ancestors had had in abundance. They just weren’t really in their element here, and they’d spent thousands upon thousands of generations treading water, never changing or adapting beyond what they had to do. Even he felt that comfortable sense of time standing still here, and in ways easy to take, with their horses and cows and hunting dogs and country manners.

  What had the Glathrielians become in the Ambrezan hex? A tropical swamp and jungle was also an invitation to stagnancy for Terrans, and on a much more primitive scale. Even when the magic of technology was allowed to work, the regions of Earth covered by such unlivable areas had tended to keep the inhabitants in the Stone Age. He’d seen it in the Congo, the Philippines, the Amazon interior again and again, just as they’d remained rather primitive in the arctic regions, too busy surviving to go any further until technology came to them or, in more cases than not, was forced upon them.

  And yet, even there they’d done the best they could with what they’d had. They’d become farmers where it was possible; fishers near seas, lakes, and oceans; hunters and managers of game, with social organizations of varying degrees as geography allowed. From the spear and blowgun to the igloo to vast irrigation channels, they’d adapted and innovated their way to some sort of culture.

  Glathriel looked all the more an enigma because of it. Even the last time Terran types had managed all this, until they’d become a threat to others and he’d set them back a bit. Had they lost once too often? Had they given up as a people?

  Or had they adapted and innovated in ways none on Earth had ever done?

  What had the girl seen by holding his hands, and how had she seen it?

  Had he perhaps set up the evolutionary mechanism and now forgotten that he had done so or, even more disturbing, done it without realizing it?

  He allowed the old man to take him all the way, down to the stake in the ground just before the hex boundary where they’d stopped the dogs. Bidding the old Ambrezan farewell with thanks, he adjusted the backpack and walked into the new Glathriel.

  It was, he thought, a nearly unimaginable feeling to enter a hex populated by people who looked very much like him and somehow feel that he was going into territory more alien than some of the strangest hexes on the Well World.

  Glathriel

  Terry Perez had been walking through the dense, wet jungle for several hours. She didn’t have much of a time sense anymore, but the night and the strangeness of the place gave her no clues as to even immediate time. She did realize that she should have been exhausted by now, but she wasn’t. Perhaps it was expectation or the creepiness of the surroundings that gave her the extra energy, but she knew she couldn’t stop until she’d reached wherever it was that was calling her.

  Certainly the signs were fresher now; she was on a main trail headed straight for a relatively large gathering of people, and that alone would satisfy her. She didn’t know what they would look like or be like, but fears of alien monsters were far from her thoughts due mostly to this place. It was too much like the Amazon, right down to its animal inhabitants, to feel alien, and without that eerie, overfilled sky it might just have been a different part of the same forest she’d been living in for months.

  In fact, she realized, without that bizarre kidnapping and the time with the People, she would have been totally unprepared and unequipped to deal with this and would have been back on the ground where she had “landed” in a sheer panic right now.

  As it was, in the darkness of the swamp, she neared her goal.

  They had not come to help her, but they appeared to be sitting there waiting for her to arrive. Two men, appearing eerily alien to her second sight, stood there in purple outline, looking like some skewed infrared or UV picture; both women had fuzzy, ball-shaped violet colorations below their breasts that neither the men nor she shared. Nor did she have the one thing that set them apart not only from herself but from the glow of animals as well.

  They all had shimmering soft, pale white auras outlining themselves.

  For the first time she really felt nervous and more than a little awkward. The shapes seemed human, at least from what she could see in the dark, but just who and what were they?

  She stopped, and there was the inevitable uneasy pause as each side waited for the other to make a move. She watched as, after a little bit, they clasped hands and saw in some surprise that the pale white auras broke and seemed to merge into a single glow. Finally, they seemed to make a silent decision, and the man on her far right raised his left hand and beckoned to her in an unmistakable gesture. After a moment’s hesitation she came forward, butterflies in her stomach, until she stood right in front of the man, close enough to note that he had bad breath and sorely needed a bath.

  He reached out and took her hand in his,
and the white aura coming from the group broke and then ran slowly up her arm and around her. When it had completely enveloped her, she felt a sudden shock to her system, and then she felt their collective minds rushing to hers, engulfing her as the aura had engulfed her body. There were no words because words were not necessary. In that instant they were a part of her and she was a part of them; they were her and she was they, individually and collectively. In that instant she was male and female, Terran and Glathrielian. All that she was, all that she had ever been, they knew because they were she; all that they knew, all that they had ever been, she was, because she was all of them.

  No introductions or explanations were required; the exchange of information, data, backgrounds, and points of view was instantaneous and total. How long it went on she did not know, but it wasn’t long, for it was still dark when they separated and she was again alone. Alone but not the same. Not quite a Glathrielian, although she knew exactly what it meant and felt like and was as comfortable here as any native. But because of that knowledge she was no longer quite a Terran, either. After she had shared minds, what was the use of names or most of the human foibles that had caused humanity to war and conquer and hate and become so prejudiced? If evil was rooted in a lack of communication and understanding, these people were without it, although they were far too knowledgeable about their world for it to be considered a new Eden. They had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and they knew the difference. It just wasn’t the difference most others thought it was.

  The point was that she could never hide anything from any of them, or they from her. The idea would have disturbed her before she had touched their minds, but it could not now.

  She understood perfectly what was going on and exactly what her role in it would be. She was content with that.